


Three Queens

by gaslightgallows (hearts_blood)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Family Secrets, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Odin (Marvel)'s A+ Parenting, Protective Frigga (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 13:38:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13008987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows
Summary: There are three women who have shaped Loki’s life, and all of them are queens.





	Three Queens

**Author's Note:**

> This story would not exist without Heather Dale’s incredible [‘Three Queens’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_QnVBKeQIc), which not only gave me the general idea but also provided a few lines that I shamelessly cribbed. Go listen to it right this minute. 
> 
> If you’re on Tumblr, please consider following me at [gaslightgallows.tumblr.com](http://gaslightgallows.tumblr.com) for more fic, reblogs about writing, and lots of randomness. Thank you for reading and especially for commenting. Comments are love. ♥

It is her idea to invade Midgard. She conceives the plan in Laufey’s bed, the same night she conceives her son. The Allfather has laid claim to the ninth realm but has not bothered to actually _conquer_ it, and his daughter and heir sees a world ripe for the plucking. Her father has married and has a bright new-minted son, and all thoughts of war and slaughter are far from his mind. Fool that he is, he sent Hela away after his marriage, as a ‘diplomatic envoy’ to Jotunheim.

But she knows it to be exile, to get her out of the way, to let the memory of her bloody victories fade from memory while his benevolence is allowed to take center stage.

His ‘benevolence’. All lies, built over the bodies of the honored dead and the bones of the conquered and the gold of a thousand worlds laid bloody and bare. It is her inheritance, her birthright, but Odin will strip her of her name and give it all to his bawling brat of a toddler.

So be it. Hela, daughter of Odin, born of no mother, needs none of _his_ glories. She is the goddess of death, and to death come all things, in their due time. She lays claim to Laufey’s heart and his bed, and in time will lay waste to his beautiful barren kingdom and remake it as her own.

She will have it all, if only she can be patient.

But she is not patient. When her time comes, she rips the child from her body, and feeds him not from her breast but from her blood, so that he will know the taste of his dam. Laufey, the idiot, calls her child small, and weak, but Hela can sense the power in his veins. He is of the line of the kings of Asgard. He is the son of one king and the grandson of another, and she will burn all of Midgard with frostfire and remake it for him. It will be easy prey.

She leaves her child in the temple before she goes to war. It is the custom of the Frost Giants to hide their valuables within their sacred places, so that their gods will keep their treasures safe. Hela would rather ride into battle with her son strapped to her back, but that would entail allowing Odin to see him, to know that he has a grandson. And she is jealous of her treasure, and does not want him to know.

“I will return for you, my own,” she promises, laying him upon the altar in a nest of wolves’ furs. He has not yet been named, but when she is triumphant, she will hold him before the throne of Asgard and name him Fenris, in honor of the great wolf who had stalked at her side through the centuries, and whom Odin still holds as a hostage in her exile.

Her son looks up at her with eyes as red as fire in his frost-blue face, and something inside her begins to hurt.

Hela presses a kiss to his forehead. “I will see you again,” she vows, and rushes out, before she can change her mind.

She expects no resistance on Earth. And from the mortals, there is none. But Odin is there, with legion upon legion of Einherjar, and even Laufey with his great casket, even Hela with all her magic and might, are no match for Odin Allfather. Enraged at her betrayal, he casts her out, binding her within the depths of Niflheim, the place where she had been borne of black water and bleached bone.

For a thousand years, she languishes, unable to see, unable to mourn. She can only wait, and plan, and hate. Until at last, at _last_ , she feels Odin’s grip on life failing, and she can be free.

She steps from her prison onto a grassy plain, and finds not Odin waiting for her, but his sons, stunned and shocked but tense and ready for battle.

The goddess of death smiles at them.

“So he’s gone? That’s a shame, I would have liked to have seen that.”

The one with the hammer is the brat. Thor, that’s what his name was. Her baby brother. And the other, that at first she mistook for Odin’s second spare, so much does he look like the Allfather in his youth, all clad in green and black, was eying her with a wary, calculating gaze as cold and frosty as the winds of Jotunheim.

A long-ago pain makes itself known in her chest, where her heart had once been. _Laufey’s son... my wolf cub..._

“You must be Hela,” says the usurper. “I’m Thor, son of Odin.”

“Really?” She looks him up and down, and sees only Odin’s ex-Valkyrie harlot. “You don’t look like him.”

Her lost child speaks. “Perhaps we can come to an arrangement,” he says, all chill and caution, and there is nothing of her in him.

_My son... oh, my son, do you not recognize me? Can you not see yourself in me?_

But there is nothing left.

“You sound like him,” she says in disgust, as what little remains of her heart shatters.

* * *

When Odin first brings her the child, her initial thought is that she is being handed the Allfather’s bastard. Until she sees his eyes, when she knows the truth. They are not Odin’s eyes, even when he had two. They are My Lady Executioner’s eyes, and Frigga’s anger turns to shock when she hears what Odin has done to his first-born.

For the rest of her life, she remembers what her husband is capable of, and cleaves to her sons in both love and terror. To Loki, especially, for Odin cannot love him except at a distance. Thor has all his father’s attention and praise, but to Loki, Frigga gives her love, her skill at close combat, and all the magic she can conjure. She teaches him lessons that Odin likes even less, how to fight not for honor or pride, but to stay alive. It is the old way, and the Allfather would prefer it stamped out. But Loki is small, and she wants him to live.

“Keep these things close to your heart, my son,” she tells him, and she means more than the first pair of daggers she gifts him, when he is ten. “So that my heart goes with you.”

He grows like creeping ivy, quietly and in corners, and then all at once, bursting into view and forcing the family to take notice. He slicks his black hair back and favours the green garments that bring out his eyes, and dotes upon his mother like a faithful champion, much to the annoyance of her husband and eldest son.

“Did I not give you flesh, and breath, and bone, as I gave him?” she teases her son, the god of thunder.

“Yes,” says Thor sheepishly.

Frigga stretches up to kiss his cheek. “Then how can I love him more, or you less, when you are both made from me?”

Thor goes away happy. Odin’s eye darkens, but he says nothing.

In Loki’s nightmares, the wolves come. Blue wolves with red eyes and black wolves with green, always coming for him. When he cries out in terror, his mother is there, pulling him into her arms, from babyhood to boyhood and well into manhood. She strokes his forehead soothingly, singing things that he can never remember in the morning, and all the time she is drawing the old memories from his mind and burying them like shameful secrets in the ivy garden she has made of her heart.

In time, those secrets spring up like weeds.

“I asked him to be honest with you from the beginning,” she says, mournfully, as she and Loki sit beside Odin’s bed. The Allfather lies unconscious between them, separating them. His majesty has always separated them. “There should be no secrets in a family.”

Loki looks more like Odin than ever, his handsome face and velvet voice well concealing the torment of his soul. But he is not yet schooled enough to hide his agony from her. “So why did he lie?”

 _To assuage his own guilt. To deny his first-born any claim upon you, should she return._ “He kept the truth from you so that you would never feel different.”

Her beautiful, shattered son gazes at her, and she sees the emptiness in his eyes. The betrayal.

“You _are_ our son, Loki. And we, your family.” A hint of desperation creeps into Frigga’s voice. “You must know that.”

He says nothing.

“You are a good son.”

There is a flicker of something.

Encouraged, she tells him not to give up hope, for his father, for his brother, that there is always purpose in what Odin does. It is the wrong thing to say.

Soon after, he is king. And not long after, he is dead. And then not. But so changed when next she sees him. “Have I made you proud?” he sneers defiantly. The shattered look is still in his eyes, hidden away.

Even when he is laid low in disgrace and insists he is no son of hers, and she cannot touch him, Frigga sits beside his bed in his cell as he lies in bed and whimpers like a lost pup, silently willing him to sleep without dreams.

She takes his nightmares with her to Valhalla, and in the company of her sisters, casts them to the golden winds, freeing him.

* * *

Brunnhilde’s first encounter with Loki tells her nothing about him at all, save that he is, like herself, an Asgardian, and – also like herself – an opportunist. It takes him barely a day to work his way into the Grandmaster’s favor, and after that, she steers clear of him. He’s dangerous, but he’ll be gone soon. The boss’s favorites never last long.

She doesn’t recognize Thor until he’s on her ship, screaming at her from beneath her feet, and when she hears that he’s Odin’s son, she takes great pleasure in zapping him into unconsciousness.

After everything Odin put her through, it’s small, but it’s gratifying.

There’s a twinge of regret, though. He does look an awful lot like Frigga. She’s heard the the interstellar scuttlebutt that Asgard’s queen fell in battle four years ago, during an invasion by the Dark Elves, and that night before Thor faces the Grandmaster’s champion, Brunnhilde offers up a prayer to her old friend, sitting and feasting among their sisters in Valhalla. It is awkward and not very eloquent. She hasn’t ever been much for praying, even before Sakaar. But it is heartfelt, in its own way. 

And at least Frigga will see her son soon. 

Thor does not die in the fight against the Hulk. He does more than ‘not die’, he damn near beats the big guy, almost felling him with a bolt of lightning shot straight from his fist that sends a shudder of remembrance through Brunnhilde (though it might also be the booze). There were rumors, about Odin’s son... the royal spawn are always proclaimed to be gods of something or other, but it’s all bullshit, just one more title for kids with more breeding than backbone. 

But Hela really _is_ the goddess of death, and Thor is clearly the god of thunder. And... isn’t there another son, born after the Fall? She’s heard rumors, but they are all confused, mixed-up and jumbled with the alcohol in her head.

Not until the next day, after Thor has told her of Odin’s death and Hela’s return, after he has escaped and accidentally taken the Hulk with him, does she realize the truth.

“Your brother!” the Grandmaster snaps at Loki. “Whatever he is, adopted, complicated – I don’t care. And your contender,” he adds, shifting his ancient, lunatic gaze to his former favorite scrapper.

Brother. Adopted. With a face like Odin in all his brutal charm and eyes like the bitch-goddess herself.

It’s all Brunnhilde can do not to slaughter him then and there. And then not five minutes later, when he pulls a knife on her, she thinks she has her chance. Until the blade dance starts, and she realizes that he fights like a Valkyrie, not for honor, but for the things that matter, for the ring of steel and the stone of home and the chance to live to fight another day.

_He’s Frigga’s son, too._

He’s also a tremendous asshole, hitting her with a mindstorm spell and pulling out the most devastating memory he can find.

Frigga’s son or not, she takes great pleasure in beating him into unconsciousness after that. Thor can have him and welcome. She never expects to see him again, after Thor relates what happened in the hangar.

But he surprises them all (well, he surprises her) when he turns up at the Bifrost, as lithe and dramatic as a favorite hound, and fights like a wolf, and then slips into the palace and unleashes Surtur to put an end to all things as coolly as if he were slipping out for a pint at the pub.

She pours him a pint on the ship later, after Thor’s coronation, when they both find themselves badly in need of quiet. And then Loki pours her one. And on and on it goes, until they pour themselves into the nearest bed like pouring water on their parched souls.

Brunnhilde tells him the truth. She knows there’s no one left to tell, and he deserves to know. “The son of two queens,” Loki murmurs as he kneels beside the bed, his cheek on her hipbone, his arms around her ribs and her legs around his back. “Brother to one, after a fashion. And now lover to one.”

“I’m no queen. Never was. Sister to one, maybe, if you count your mother. Scrapper, Valkyrie, boozehag... but no queen.”

He looks up at her with eyes as green as fire and as solemn as a wolf’s. “I am a prince of three kingdoms. Would I kneel to anyone else?”


End file.
